Today when an individual wishes to construct his or her family tree he or she will often talk to as many relatives as they can reasonably contact and get their best recollections of the family relationships. From this information, they will construct the best possible family tree from the available information. A family tree constructed in this manner may often be incomplete since it relies on the memories of those currently living. As such, it may only cover a few past generations unless a tree had previously been constructed. Alternatively, there are other sources of information including government and church records. The Mormon Church, for example, maintains an extensive database of birth and death records. These sources, however, may be difficult and time-consuming to review and may involve extensive communications to obtain the relevant data. Also, in many cases, an individual may need to know the place of birth or death in order to search the relevant database. Once the relevant information has been obtained, the person will need to construct the family tree, though there is commercial software to do this, such as Family Tree Maker, which is currently available from The Learning Company. Another alternative is to pay a third party provider to construct a family tree. This can be expensive and may also contain inaccuracies. Finally, in all of these cases, the data available for the family tree is likely to only consist of the names, dates and places of birth and death, and relationships of family members. While this data will be sufficient to create a classical family tree, it will lack such information as pictures, news clippings, voice or video clips, music, etc. that could enrich the experience of reviewing the family tree.
Thus, there is a need to provide a simple, effective, and inexpensive way to gather information to construct a family tree and to broadly distribute the final result. Additionally, when such information as pictures, sound clips, etc. are added to the family tree, the final result becomes much more valuable and pleasurable for those reviewing the tree.
The present invention seeks to solve these problems by utilizing a communication network, such as the Internet, to allow people to search a wide variety of servers linked to the network, for information that can be used to construct the family tree.